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In traditional geological field practice (GFP), there are many problems, such as waste of human and material resources, dispersion of geological phenomenon and failure to reproduce geological processes, which lead to the inefficiency of traditional education. Recently, virtual geographic environment (VGE) has become increasingly popular. It can provide us an immersive, interactive and collaborative three-dimensional (3D) multi-user virtual environment which can help us to solve the above problems. In this paper, we present a Virtual Geological Field Practice System (VGFPS) for Huyu Region based on OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world server which can be used to create VGEs. VGFPS integrates texts, images, videos and other multimedia with digital elevation models (DEMs), remote sensing (RS) images, buildings and landscapes, geological process simulation models and in-world scripts to enable teachers and students to explore, navigate, interact in virtual environment and communicate, collaborate with each other. Practices show it’s feasible to use VGEs to make GFP education more effective and it can be applied to the domain of virtual education.

Dam-break flood affected by highly changing and complex environment, has some characteristics including the sudden of occurrence, the rapid of expansion and the urgency of respond. This paper focuses on how to develop a virtual geographic environment (VGE) system to study the dam-break flood routing and its impact. Unlike existing work, our methods pay attention to the multidimensional and dynamic analysis methods in virtual geographic environment, which make flood routing easily understood to public and officers. Moreover, some GIS spatial analysis and real-time interactive operation with the VGE will also be implemented to support the risk assessment of the dam-break. Finally, a prototype system is developed to construct a virtual geographic environment for impact analysis of dam-break flood routing and dynamic interaction. Experimental results prove that the scheme addressed in the paper is effective and feasible.